Transcript of 1998 Interview - Part 4

JWW: Janet’s name?

CJW: I don’t know.

JWW: Elizabeth, of course, is …

CJW: My mother.

JWW: … is your mother, but it is also my mother’s sister’s middle name.

CJW: Betty’s?

JWW: Mmm-hmm. Marjorie Elizabeth.

CJW: I didn’t know that.

JWW: Yeah, that’s where Betty comes from.

CJW: I knew … oh … I had forgotten her first name was Marjorie!

JWW: When Janet was born, my older sister and I presumed that you were trying to keep a string of Js going. [laughs]. And that’s why you gave her a name beginning with J.

CJW: I doubt that that was conscious. I have no idea why we did that. Was there anybody in New York that would have done that … no.

JWW: Well, that’s a good name. And then you have Bill, William Warren. Now, was Warren after Earl Warren?

CJW: No. Warren Hewitt. In Gloucester.

JWW: I remember that name now. Yes, you told me the story of his … perfidious behavior, I would call [it].

CJW: Well, as I wrote Marj, it can be explained, and I didn’t hold it against him.

JWW: That was very nice, yeah.

CJW: Did she show you my explanation?

JWW: Yeah.

CJW: OK, then you know what it is. I would never hold it against a sixty year-old man with two children not yet into their teens, who had a home on Wingaersheek Beach – not a nice home, but a great location -

JWW: Oceanfront property.

CJW … and of an age where he probably wouldn’t ever gotten another job, the kind of work he did. His job was taking grocery orders over the telephone, for S.S. Pearse in Boston. Moneyed people in Cape Ann would buy their fancy goods from S.S. Pearse, and the truck would come up a couple times a week from Boston. There was probably only one job like that in Massachusetts. So I would never hold it against him, no – not and I didn’t at the time. I felt … he had an older daughter, that I remember was an officer in Rainbow Girls, if you remember Rainbow Girls.

JWW: Oh sure, yeah.

CJW: … girls thing of the Eastern Star, which was connected with the Masonic Order. And I was a Mason at the time.

JWW: I remember you were a Mason once.

CJW: But I demitted when not one single Mason stood up for me. And the one who stood up for me were people like Vincent Ferrini, and other people who didn’t have any “standing” in Gloucester.

JWW: Did Vincent Ferrini do the sculpture that’s on top of the bookcase that we’re going to look at in a little bit?

CJW: [shakes his head no].

JWW: That was not Vincent?

CJW: That was not Vincent.

JWW: Well, you once had an oil painting in your house that Vincent did.

CJW: I don’t know who has it. Janet?

JWW: Janet may have it, yeah. It’s not in Phoenix, I know that, so .... Not looking for it, so ….

CJW: I don’t think it’s in San Fran, so I think it’s in Janet’s house.

JWW: Janet or maybe Bill.

CJW: Maybe Bill. I don’t know.

JWW: Back to your mom if we could for a minute. I remember a story about … I will call it the miraculous healing of the cut arm. But maybe for the camera you would explain what happened to you and what your mother had done with the cobwebs and so forth.

CJW: I forget what I was cutting with a sharp carving knife, and I got a bad cut, right here, across this finger [holds up right index finger], and bleeding like a stuck pig, and I was in the kitchen. So she just went downstairs into the cellar, where there were a great many spider webs, got a handful of them, put them on [my finger], wrapped a rag around it, tied it, … the bleeding stopped, and the cut was healed in three days. I am sure today we would put a half a dozen stitches in it.

JWW: And you didn’t have a scar.

CJW: I had for years, very slight … still, still you can see just a little bit.

JWW: To me it suggests that there is a certain kind of wisdom and experience in the world that has remained outside the purview of medical schools and traditional western medicine. I wonder if there were other things of that nature she may have done.

CJW: Yeah. There was …. Incidentally, I think what the spider webs did, and maybe they’ve found out in the labs since then, I think they must have had a clotting quality, and if they could isolate that in the lab, and make it into a salve, it would be a neat way of …. But she also … some of it I don’t know if it helped or not. For example, a sore throat. When I was a boy we wore what we called knickers, which came down to the knee, and then black stockings. So with a sore throat, she would take one of my used stockings, that is, unwashed, soak it in kerosene, and tie it around my neck. And my sore throat got better, either because it had certain qualities, or because I couldn’t stand that stocking around my neck, and [laughing] decided to get well, and get rid of it! But … there you are.

JWW: I suppose it’s possible the cold germs couldn’t survive in an atmosphere in which there were some petrochemical fumes.

CJW: Certainly I would have been inhaling those kerosene fumes. Let’s see, what else. There were times in seasons of cold, I had one of these bags called asopoteto [?] around my neck. As I recall, they had a stench. It might have kept colds away, but it kept my friends away! [laughs]

JWW: You had mentioned once that your mother had been at some point when you were a child admonishing you about something you were doing, and had reminded you that a certain person, who was at that time already deceased, wouldn’t like it if you would continue doing it. Do you remember that?

CJW: Yes, I do, because I remember the incident.

JWW: What was the story of that?

CJW: Well, my sister and I were being very disobedient. Refused to obey her. And she went upstairs, second floor. A few minutes later, she appeared at the top of the stairs, with a bright red robe around her, and she said, “Mr. Hopson doesn’t like this.”

JWW: It was in the present tense.

CJW: Yeah. And Mr. Hopson, of course, was the previous owner of that house at 32 Oliver Street. And I’m not sure what else she said, but something to the effect, “He doesn’t leave this house. He had it once.” Now, I don’t know whether it improved our behavior or not, that part just escapes me.

JWW: So, this is not where Hobson’s Choice comes from, though, does it?

CJW: No, this is HOP-son.

JWW: Oh, Hopson, OK.

CJW: Mr. Hopson. And he left a lot of stuff that disappeared over the years; he was a geological collector. And there were chests and chests of various stones, all marked with the kind. Well, I don’t know whether they just disappeared; maybe I threw them out the door, maybe somebody else did, but it was really quite a geological collection. And he left a very well-carved wooden three-masted vessel that I think I broke up, I tried to take it down to a pawn and sale. So Mr. Hopson was a factor in that way. Whether or not there ever was a Mrs. Hopson, or little Hopsons, I never could find evidence.

JWW: I was trying to remember, you were talking about … Marj was born in Springfield; I’m not sure what you were doing in Springfield in 1938, but you were in Springfield. So this was outside the context of Quonset, which came later.

CJW: That came a year later, yeah.

JWW: … and I guess past the point when you were working in the accounting firm.

CJW: Oh yeah, I was working for National Cash Register Company.

JWW: Oh, NCR. I see. So you were in Springfield working there. So after 1938, you were in Whitman.

CJW: Oh, that was after Quonset.

JWW: That was after Quonset. You were in Whitman. I was already born at that point in time. And you were then working at …

CJW: Hingham shipyard.

JWW: Hingham shipyard. OK. How did you get to Whitman?

CJW: Oh, that was because your mother’s aunt – can’t remember her name.

JWW: Bessie?

CJW: Bessie, who had died, left a Whitman house to, I think, Mildred’s mother,

JWW: I see – Gertrude.

CJW … or else she was the only surviving member, one or the other. And so we were apparently the available ones to go and sort things out.

JWW: I see. So that had been Bessie’s house.

CJW: Yeah. And it was quite a job, because I remember, up in the attic, there were piles of the Boston Post dating from 1920. How that house ever survived without going into spontaneous combustion, I’ll never know! And I think there were a lot of things to sort out, which your mother did … I’ve forgotten all the varieties of that.

JWW: I remember it as being a grey house, that had some French doors, some glass-paned French doors somewhere on the inside front, either going into the living room, or up in the second floor.

CJW: We were on the second floor, because it was a two-family house.

JWW: OK.

CJW: There was a family living and paying rent on the first floor.

JWW: I see. So we had glass doors, probably to separate the two living areas.

CJW: I think so, it [inaudible] in my mind.

JWW: And the driveway was not paved, it had sharp gravel in it, is what I remember, because I played in it a lot.

CJW: Sure. Sure. One of my memories of Whitman – funny one. Here I am, I’m in a diner down [in] the center of Whitman, just at the time that Spellman, the Archbishop of New York, was made a Cardinal. And of course, that was the buzz, the hometown boy, because he was the son of a Whitman grocer named Spellman. So they were talking about it, and someone [came] up, one fellow who was real … shake-the-hand-who-shook-the-hand-of-John-L.-Sullivan kind of guy, and out of the midst of this conversation, suddenly his voice pipes up, “Why, sure I know Frank!” And that was Whitman’s claim to fame, that Cardinal Spellman came from there. It wasn’t a bad place to live. It didn’t take long to get to some of the beaches like Green Harbor. And then of course, after the house was sold, we moved to that house that we bought, up on whatever street it was. The place where you hit your head on the iron range, going down.

JWW: Now, see, I don’t remember that.

CJW: It was quite a bad cut right here [runs finger across forehead].

JWW: Yeah, I’m foggy on whether we had moved before Peter and Martha or not.

CJW: Before. We were in that house when Peter and Martha died.

JWW: In the Whitman house?

CJW: The one … not the original Whitman house, but the second one, the one we bought. For believe it or not, $1,500.

JWW: OK. I remember being in the kitchen of that house when my mother got the call from the hospital that one of the two children had died. It must have been the second one, because I think the first one didn’t live long at all.

CJW: A few hours.

JWW: Yeah. The second one lived a month?

CJW: Thirty days.

JWW: Thirty days. And which was which?

CJW: Martha was the one that died first. Peter lived thirty days.

JWW: Peter lived thirty days, yeah. And I remember being in the kitchen. The kitchen was in the back of the house, and rather … my memory – of course, as a small child – was that it was a rather large kitchen.

CJW: It was. Like many New England houses. At that time, and again, it seems to me that my cousin, Henry, that I spoke to you about yesterday, he took care of the funeral arrangements …

JWW: For the twins?

CJW: … for the twins, and they were buried in a Paulding family lot in Duxbury. That’s my recollection.

JWW: You know, I think that same cemetery has Bud’s ashes in it.

CJW: Oh, does it?

JWW: Yeah, we went to an internment – is that the correct term?

CJW: Yeah.

JWW: … service at a little church down there, that I think is a family … there are some family graves, and that’s where Bud’s ashes were committed. So I do remember that from, you know, whatever that was, ten to twelve years ago.

CJW: Was your mother’s mother buried there too? Gertrude?

JWW: He died before she did.

CJW: No, Gertrude.

JWW: I know. Bud died before his mother did.

CJW: Yeah, but after that, was she interred there.

JWW: You know, I’m not sure.

CJW: OK, I just wondered.

JWW: I’m not sure. Because she had an open casket, and she … her service was held right in the funeral home, and then subsequent to the service, she was cremated, her body was cremated, but I do not know …

CJW: … what they did with the ashes.

JWW: … what they did with the ashes. I don’t know. That’s interesting. I had thought there was a plot for her, somewhere.

CJW: Maybe Duxbury.

JWW: It sounds right.

CJW: You can – and many people do – inter the little container with the ashes. That’s what Sara did with her mother. She has a family plot in Winter Haven.

JWW: And that’s what was done with Bud’s ashes, as well.

CJW: Well, I imagine Buddy Paulding must be well-retired by this time too.

JWW: I don’t who of us may have … I think my mother keeps up with the Pauldings some. I know she saw Dick recently, within the past year.

CJW: Well, for a long time he lived in that area.

JWW: Yes, he did. She lived in Reading. He lived in North Reading.

CJW: Oh, OK.

JWW: And I think now he lives outside the outer belt of Boston, which is 495, and so he’s probably forty or fifty miles out there. I don’t know what he’s doing.

CJW: Wouldn’t take you long.

JWW: I have not seen Bud or Dick since Sylvia died. Which wasn’t that many years after Bud died. And they both seemed fine at the time. Well, Buddy was born in 1929. And so, gosh, he would be … he’s getting close to 70.

CJW: Amazing.

JWW: Isn’t that hard to believe?

CJW: Yes it is. Although, when I think back, both Bud and Bunny were so young when they had Buddy.

JWW: Yeah, I think Bud would have been about, somewhere in the region of, I would guess, about eighteen.

CJW: And she was a year or two younger. If I’m not mistaken, she was sixteen. Or sixteen at the time she became pregnant, let me put it that way. But I could be wrong about that.

JWW: Yeah. Well, let’s see how we are doing on our list here. I don’t want to make you …. I don’t know that we really talked about Marj’s other questions here involving your stance on nonviolence as a conscious choice, and how that played into family life, and where that may be grounded. I have to say, in all honesty, I never thought about this question, because as a youngster, your presence on the pulpit and your persona in a debate, were, I think at times overwhelming, and ferocious. And so when she comes up with this question on nonviolence, I’m scratching my head thinking, “Are we talking about the same person?” But of course we are, because I’ve not been aware of you in a violent situation. So, while the question at first surprised me, I believe her question is probably true, and I’m curious about if you have any conscious orientation ….

CJW: I have no conscious memory of your mother and I talking that over, and saying “Well, this is what we’ll do, and this is what we’ll not do.” No conscious memory of that at all. If I had to make a guess, I would say that there was almost a tacit agreement that we’d each come to separately and didn’t need to discuss. Best thing I can do with that.

JWW: That sounds right to me. Well, let’s see … what else? I’m not sure … I think you’ve really done a nice job with all these questions that have come at you, and I think people who get a chance to see this later will appreciate it. I’m not sure what I would do with this question she sent, if it was put in front of me, which is, she says, you strike me as a person who has done more living than regretting. Do you have any regrets you would like to share?

[both laugh]

I’m not laughing at Marj, or the question so much, as, how anybody would … you’re not writing your autobiography here, exactly, or even imprecisely … how would you handle a question like that?

CJW: Well, I guess I’ll handle it this way, and I think honestly. One, I have made a great many mistakes, and have regretted them. But unconsciously or consciously, they cannot rule my life. If there are things that I can atone [for], for some of the mistakes I have made, I would try to do so … and maybe I have tried to do so. But in terms of … at this age of mine, saying, “Oh Lord, don’t I regret doing that, don’t I …” I don’t, because … who I was at the time, in the context of the time, [it] didn’t seem to be such a big mistake.

JWW: I would, maybe, suggest a further thought for discussion, which is that maybe one of the harder things for people to learn, and maybe they all learn to do this in different ways, is to forgive themselves for things they might otherwise regret. You may have encountered the need to provide that kind of counseling to parishioners, who found themselves in situations where they needed to find out how they were going to deal with acts that might have otherwise been regretful for them … the old saying that “guilt is the gift that keeps on giving.” But if you can find ways to forgive yourself, then in all likelihood, others will also.

CJW: Yeah. One of the sentences in some sermon or other that I delivered, I said that it is more important to forgive yourself than to forgive others. What you can do for others by forgiving them is a bit limited. But you may act in terms of that, and it may be another story. But I remember, I was at a meeting, it was in Connecticut, it was a meeting of Congregationalists, and I was the official representative of the Universalist Church of America to this conference. And one of their very good speakers addressed this question, and he simply said, “We’re all guilty. If you’re not guilty, you’re not on this planet.” And I remembered that. And I think it’s true. I think it’s true. I don’t think anyone considers himself or herself to be perfect in their understanding of their parents or their children. I don’t think it can be done. And so are we going to feel guilty about it? Yes, we will – everybody is guilty. So we might as well get on with our lives.

JWW: I would hope to operate with that view – continue to personally operate with that view, but the basis for that in my case would be to see … I like to think of the world as being composed of people with a great variety of psychological makeups, I won’t say infinite – but it’s many, it’s lots. And if you start from that position, then you don’t find it necessary to hold yourself accountable to understand or explain everything or anything somebody else may do, whether it’s a relative or not. It’s not a cop-out, I’m not thinking about it in terms cop-out, only as reality.

CJW: I would agree with that and I would add one other thing, and that is that one is an individual in a particular culture. And it makes a difference, I think, in psychological responses, if one has been brought up, as a member, say, of Gandhi’s household, as against a member of General Eisenhower’s family. The cultural complexes are different, and one of the problems that I find with evolutionary psychology, to get back to that, is that I’m not sure that it completely encompasses cultural differences, cultural inheritances, cultural responses. I’ll give you an example, it may be a bit disgusting for some people, but they can tune it out. When I was running the warehouse, I had two guys working for me; I remember their names – one was Farmer and one was Connolly. And Farmer claimed to have a good deal of American Indian blood in him. And he insisted that the way to cure a boil quickly and completely was to cover the boil with human feces, wrap that shit around with a rag, and in a couple of days, the boil would be gone. And I remember Connolly, who was a used car salesman that didn’t have a job because there weren’t any cars to sell, he exploded at him, called him a goddamn fool and everything like that, but all Farmer would say was, “Next time you have a boil, try it.” He said, “I will – like hell!” [laughs] So, here we have a fellow who says that’s Indian lore, Indian healing, and Connolly, whose parents came from Ireland, and was a sharp-shooting American used car salesman with all that implies, he just couldn’t understand that at all. So I think in a similar way, there are cultural differences that are very difficult to understand. And it isn’t a question alone of tolerating – I’m not sure I like the word tolerating anymore – it’s a question of accepting. So he’s a … English Labor Prime Minister. O.K. What’s he doing that can affect us positively or negatively? That’s what’s important to me. Many things more may be important to a citizen of the U.K. So I would accept that … we must accept that the racial problem in the U.S., while there’s been advances, isn’t just a question of toleration, it’s a question of acceptance. And I’m not sure we’ve reached that on many levels.

JWW: What kind of stereotypes and prejudice and things of that ilk were prevalent on Oliver Street in the 20s and in the 30s, in Malden or Everett, or wherever you lived?

CJW: I can only speak for the kids, because the parents were a very vague thing in the background. And we were a bunch of kids on Oliver Street. The Hussey Family – Jim and Jean, the Nordgrens (Edwin and Lloyd), I forget the names of the other family; the Kellys, who were a black family, the Gibbs were a black family. Almost all, with the exception of the blacks, were the children of immigrants. Jim Hussey and Jean Hussey’s parents came from Newfoundland. Mine from Sweden. The Nordgren boys from Norway. I forget the other country. There was only one family … there was a four-tenement building just down the street from me, on the other side of the street. The only family that became aloof, and this may not make me popular with some members of the family, [was] the Snook family. Jack Snook was about my age; I don’t think Ed had even been born.

JWW: Jack was the Methodist minister?

CJW: Yeah. But the Snooks would not allow their children to play with us. Maybe there was good judgment – I won’t deny that! But in terms of prejudice, our problem was, and we made a couple ventures across Broadway, over High Street, was what we called the Yankees – who didn’t like us any better than we liked them. But it wasn’t a permanent thing – occasional. By the time we got in high school, it was all gone. It was a wonderful immigrant culture in some ways, which is why, with all their faults, I cannot believe that we wouldn’t be better off without all public schools. It was a real … meshing proposition. And I remember two of the brightest kids in my high school both went on to law school – Harvard Law School – became lawyers – their father was Harry the Rag Man. Immigrant from somewhere in eastern Europe. Jewish, of course. And he had his wagon and horse, and he’d go around buying rags and bottles and cans and ….

JWW: Recycling.

CJW: Yep. And Harry the Rag Man saw his two boys through Harvard Law School. And that’s the kind of America that I grew up with. And so it certainly gave me an appreciation that – I don’t care what country your folks came from.

JWW: [Do] you think Oliver Street was sort of unusual?

CJW: I’m not that sure. It was unusual in the fact that many sections of the city were enclaves. If you remember, a part of the city was called The Village. That was all Italian. All Italian. On the other side of Broadway, for the most part, it was the traditional American population. On our side of Broadway, you had the mixed population. We had a number of Irish families, whom we knew, we would play with, who would come down from other places, to play with us. We had a wonderful park to play pickup baseball, in a place called Glendale Park, [within] walking distance. And there was pretty much equality on Oliver Street, in that all families were poor. I remember going with Jim Kelly and his BB rifle, burlap bag, to hold the sparrows he shot. When he shot enough of them, they would make a sparrow stew. Sounds unbelievable today, doesn’t it?

JWW: Well, when I was in France, I had barbecued woodthrush, which is a bird that is first cousin to the robin, I think – bigger than a sparrow, but it was quite good, so I imagine it was a good pie.

CJW: And Jim Kelly grew up to become the first black lieutenant on the Everett police force.

JWW: Oh really!

CJW: He may have become chief, for all I know.

JWW: You were gone by then.

CJW: And he was the kind of fellow today who I suppose would be playing basketball, because as a teenager, he was about 6 foot 2, and strong. And there were families … there was another family with a single daughter; she wasn’t allowed to play with us at all. But all in all, it wasn’t a bad place to grow up.

JWW: You once talked about having taken out a picket fence on a sled. And I don’t know if that was while you were living on Oliver Street or not, but it must have been a cold winter, because you didn’t always get frozen conditions in the Massachusetts Bay area, because of the ocean effect.

CJW: We did have some spells of weather. I’m trying to remember what that was. It wasn’t Halloween, was it?

JWW: Well, you’d gone down the hill on a sled, and couldn’t turn ….

CJW: Oh! Oh! Oh! No. Yeah. My head went through the picket fence. Wooden picket fence.

JWW: And you had a lump on your head … for a long time.

CJW: Yeah, still there.

JWW: It may still be there.

CJW: Yeah, I remember that well. I hit the lower part of the picket fence. I can remember the hill very well, but have forgotten the name of it. Yep. And that was where I first tried to ski, and gave that up, because my father made me a couple – a pair of skis out of barrel staves.

JWW: I bet they were good! [laughs]

CJW: It didn’t work for me. [laughs] It discouraged me from skiing.

JWW: [laughs] Well, his heart was in the right place, anyway.

CJW: Oh yeah, right. And another thing – speaking of him – he also said that he went seven miles to school every day, sometimes on skis.

JWW: Oh really?

CJW: In Sweden.

JWW: Maybe my love of skiing is somehow genetic!

CJW: It skips a generation! Although, he never skied when he came to this country, that I know of.

JWW: Well, that would have been cross-country skiing, as opposed to downhill ….

CJW: Right, right. Yeah. And … maybe that’s why there are so many good cross-country skiers in the Scandinavian countries – because they all had to go to school!

JWW: They can’t get to school if they can’t ski.

CJW: That’s right.

JWW: I took a cross-country ski lesson this winter, and the instructor said that a good cross-country skier could keep up – could keep up a pace of ten to twelve miles per hour for quite awhile if he was in good shape, and a good skier. So your dad might well have covered that seven miles in thirty or forty minutes.

CJW: I have no idea. I wish I had known enough to ask more questions.

JWW: Well, how would you?

CJW: But I have seen the cross-country skiers in Olympic games and so forth, and they are good. They are good. The way they use their poles and skis in perfect rhythm.

JWW: Well, my purpose is not to give away all the secrets of your misspent youth or anything, but I do also remember your talking about a game you used to play with your friends on a railroad trestle in one of the Back Bay areas of Boston. And I think what you used to do, is stand on the tracks, until the train approached, and got pretty near, and then at the last minute you would jump off the trestle into the water.

CJW: Yeah. It wasn’t in Back Bay, it was in Everett.

JWW: Oh, it was in Everett.

CJW: There was a stream there, I don’t think the stream is there anymore. And, yes, we would do that. But the way the tie was built, the track is here [motions off-camera], and then there’s about twelve inches of the tie, so if one stayed at the very edge of the tie …

JWW: You could actually let the train pass?

CJW: I think you could let the train pass. But, yeah, we used to jump in the water, until the oil companies got that so flavored with oil debris that even we didn’t want to jump in it anymore.

JWW: Well, at one point in time, that may have become sort of like the Cuyahoga River in Ohio, which one year caught fire from all the stuff floating in it. It may have caught fire while we were living there.

CJW: It did. Very similar. Very similar. [makes motion to stop recording]

[break]

JWW: Now live again. So you were … we’ve been at this for almost four hours, and I’m sure that if my siblings had a chance to be able to do what I’m doing, they’d have four more hours of questions for you that I haven’t thought of, but perhaps you’d have some things you want say to your descendants, or others who might be interested in your life or yourself … here’s your chance.

CJW: I’d like to conclude this with a word to my – particularly my grandchildren, great-grandchildren, some of whom may never know me. I want you to think of family time. My grandfather was born in 1842. My father was born in 1884. I was born in 1911. John, Marj, Janet, Bill, can give you the years they were born. But in any event, you can, with a little arithmetic, you can see that I’ve been talking about roots that go back more than 150 years. A great many things happened in that 150 years. Some people believe, and I guess I won’t argue, that there have been more changes, important changes in the world, since 1945 than any previous era in history – particularly when I talk about atomic weapons, the computer, the television, the advances in not only medicine, but chemical warfare …. So when tempted to end the whole human enterprise, think back on the roots, at least to 1842, beginning with John Wilson, whom I have talked about. I love you all.

[break]

JWW: Well, Carl Westman has been a trooper to give us all this time and insight and openness, and we thought what we would do is talk a little bit about Carl’s apartment and some of the things that he has kept, as he has downsized over the years, moving to places easier to manage, as we all do, I think in time – we’re working on that right now ourselves. Carl is on the eighth floor of Jefferson Center, which we’ll walk around and see. He has a very nice view of Sarasota, downtown Sarasota, and some of the water that’s between the city of Sarasota and body of … a sandbar, a sand spit known as Siesta Key.

CJW: Correct.

JWW: So we’ll shut this off for a moment, re-arm with a battery, and then go around and see what kind of things Carl has kept near him to sustain him.

[break]

JWW: Where would you like to start with your little walk around the apartment, Dad?

CJW: I’m starting with some prints from the French artist, Henri Matisse. They particularly appeal to me because of the way the lines are drawn, and the shapes, and leave so much to the imagination. So there’s that print there, there are two on that wall. And over on the right ….

JWW: Try to get the glare off this a little bit, I think I’ve got most of it off.

CJW: It’s supposed to be non-glare glass – that’s what I paid for.

JWW: Well, OK. So we’ve got those three Matisse.

CJW: And in the middle, is print of Joan Miró, and that appeals to me, because it allows me to use my imagination, and its color and weird forms, set all kinds of speculation, when I am in the mood. And over in this wall, is my Arizona wall, due to the luck of having John and Renée as my relatives. First one is a print of the San Francisco Mountains, near Flagstaff, Arizona. It’s a print that was apparently a key in the festival. And the other two are prints by an American Indian, who I believe who is a Navajo, but I might be wrong about that …

JWW: I think that’s right.

CJW: … whose work just appeals to me tremendously. Part of what Sara calls my women. An artist friend of mine who visited me, Harvey Broccoli, whom I knew from Rochester, was particularly taken, he said, by the way Gorman uses color and shape, particularly in this one here – if you notice the way he has that red color, the lines coming down [her] shoulder, where she spreads out because she’s sitting, and the appearance of that foot at the bottom. So those are both very appealing to me, and I think they are masterpieces. If I were a rich man, I’d have Gorman originals. And the sculptures, well, they were gifts. The first one is an Indian god, Hindu, I should say, given to me by Milt and Rose Frank. Milt is now dead; Rose has also moved to Sarasota and remains a good friend. In the middle is another one that they gave us, that they got in some southwestern gallery. I kept the …. Well, I’ve forgotten the artist’s name, I must have it somewhere. And the third, that gunmetal structure, was given to me in Akron, Ohio, by an artist named Betty, and I’ve forgotten her last name, she moved to California. But she calls it The Prophet, and she said I was the model for it, which was a very complimentary type of gift, it seems to me.

JWW: I remember that being in your house for a long time.

CJW: Yeah. And in the window are little images that various people have given me through the years.

JWW: I’m not sure how good these will come out with the blinding light behind them, but we will scan in on one of them and just go across, and see what we can pick up. Yep. OK.

CJW: And down here is a bookcase devoted and crowded with pictures of my family, including a picture of my father, the only picture I have of him.

JWW: I’m going to move in on that, see what I can get. I would say, of all the children, Bill looks the most like him.

CJW: It’s hard to say.

JWW: OK, we’ve got that.

CJW: And so, these are highly prized by me, and I’ve skipped the job of getting a bigger place to put them, or else sorting them out a bit.

JWW: What have we got in the hall, Dad?

CJW: Well, we’ve got Rouault, a French artist, and to me, this is one of the most appealing paintings that I know of, because somehow, perhaps it’s my imagination, but the clown’s eyes follow me as I wander around this large apartment. And some people interpret this work of Rouault as being the Clown Christ, and others have related it to the song, “Bring in the clowns; don’t bother, they’re here.” And, well, here I have pictures, which won’t come out, of Cambridge.

JWW: I’ll trade places with you. I might be able to get something there.

CJW: Cambridge, which Sara and I have visited a number of times, and we still get nostalgic for it, when one of our friends visits there and writes us about it, as happened recently.

JWW: Even though nostalgia is not what it used to be?

CJW: Even though nostalgia isn’t what it used to be.

JWW: Alright, where do we want to go now?

CJW: That’s it.

[break]

JWW: … I wanted to shoot here.

CJW: It’s a Miró, and again it’s a matter of shape and color. If I translate the French correctly, it’s something about the Sun and stars. And he’s not a bit bashful about putting his name in large letters, is he?

JWW: No.

Transcript of 1998 Interview - Part 3

JWW … the role that preaching in Rensselaer Falls or Hugleton or places like that had on your eventual career or your style.

CJW: I don’t think the experiences there had much effect on me, except in considerable sympathy for, and knowledge about, the Methodist Church, at levels above the local church. Most local constituencies were quite conservative theologically, but at other levels of the denomination, faculties of Methodist theological schools, the district superintendents, the bishops, they all had an equivalent education as to what we in more liberal ministry had. They looked, as we did, upon the Bible as the literature of peoples; although they might have used “The Word of God”, they didn’t really believe that …

JWW: That’s interesting!

CJW: ... and in fact, I was offered a job by a Methodist bishop, because, I guess I had told the district superintendent of some of my experiences in the workforce, and the disillusion I felt with management, when I was a so-called foreman, and couldn’t be an advocate for the laborers anymore. And so I was told – I didn’t have anything in writing – that Bishop Oxnam, who was rather famous in his day – might have a staff position in which I would be sort of a representative of the Methodist Church for labor unions. I said, “I don’t believe what you fellows believe.” They said, “No, we know you don’t. We do ask you to read the creeds and the Lord’s Prayer, but you don’t have to believe it. What we’re interested in (to use their language) is, are you a man of the heart? Do you care about people?” Of course, I turned it down, because I wasn’t in the habit of saying things I didn’t believe, and I wasn’t about to begin then. But I did get an appreciation.

I remember another bishop speaking at a conference. His theme was the old song, “The old-time religion, it was good enough for Moses.” And he said, “The old-time religion – it may have been good enough for Moses, but it’s not good enough for me.” He took each part of that song, [and he] referenced to today and its problems. So I have a great deal of respect for the Methodist Church, and have since that time.

JWW: Can you look back to perhaps what people refer to as formative years, and find the sources or the wellspring of your agnosticism?

CJW: Well, as I said … I guess I said it at lunch, certainly my father’s death was a spur. Because how does a boy, barely into his teens, reconcile that. And I’m not sure I had given much thought such matters before. But that, combined with the liberal people – agnostic, as well as liberal – and the atmosphere of freedom that prevailed in our church (that is, you must form your own convictions), plus the influence of such people, as we mentioned, Charles Francis Potter, founder of the American Humanist Association, plus some of my reading in John Dewey, particularly, the American philosopher. Somewhere in his work he called God “the process of ideals becoming real.” And while I wouldn’t use the word “God”, in a sense that was the process of religion in which I believed. Ideals have disillusions; most ideals cannot be achieved, but you can take steps toward it.

JWW: Well, at least in our family, you are the church historian, so my question may not be even the right question, but I’m thinking of how the church got from the late 18^th century, which I think of as having migrated from being Trinitarians to Unitarians, but they were still Deists, and they were still Christians, to the early 20^th century, where your church, at least, was asking you to form your own beliefs. [Were] there some major turns in the road, or was this a very gradual evolution?

CJW: There certainly were. One, with which you are well-acquainted, was Charles Darwin. Secondly, Freud. Freud in the sense that, among other things, he advocated that many of the things that we think of as religious goals are childhood wishes, and when we [inaudible] to “God the Father” we are expressing the ambivalance that most people feel toward their real-life fathers – they love them and yet they hate them. Darwin, Freud, and Marx. It isn’t that people adopted, necessarily, the Marxian theory of communism, but rather that he forced a great many people to examine what their beliefs about the human venture, and its laborers, were.

JWW: Maybe an extension of 18^th century Enlightenment these things ….

CJW: That was very important too. Yeah. I should have mentioned that. Writings of John Locke. Now you see, that was greatly influential in our “founding fathers” – Jefferson, Adams, Monroe, Washington – they were Deists. Now, one of the things that the fundamentalist Christians won’t accept, is that a Deist is a very different breed of cat, than what they’re talking about. Because the Deist really believed in a god of Nature, and that Nature started all this going, all these processes, and God, if there was a God, he just simply went elsewhere and let the laws of nature work themselves out in all the varieties of ways it has.

JWW: So Darwin would find no conflict with those Deists.

CJW: Yes and No. There is a biography of Charles Darwin, in which he … he was ambivalent. He could believe two things at the same time.

JWW: Good politician!

CJW: [laughs] But you’d have to have a greater knowledge of Darwin than I have. He certainly was a believer in natural selection, there’s no question about that. Now, you see, evolutionary God-believers, went from the Deists, that is, they all started in motion, to the ones who thought that evolution WAS God.

[video break]

A difficult concept, and certainly nothing to do with God as a being, but God as being. There’s a distinction there.

JWW: Having pursued a different career than you did, in my life, maybe others would find the same kind of perspective useful, you talked about God being the process by which these things happen, and working in industry, commerce, and banking, my own thoughts about free enterprise and the market are similar, in that only a fool would say that these things can operate without constraints, restrictions, enhancements, and regulations, and it’s the process of finding those that balance the spirit that free enterprise may give rise to in enterprising people, and the need to have these activities take place within a humane environment, where not only the rights of this generation, but future generations, are considered, when we look at pollution and things like that. So I see that as a process too.

CJW: I think so too. I think that somewhere in Adam Smith – the original Adam Smith – he says something very much like that. And certainly, the influence of the Enlightenment thinkers on economics was considerable. The market, for example … if you want to sell as much as you can, and make money, you’ve got to cut costs as much as you can. And that resulted in excesses, particularly as such in mill and mine, which had to be regulated, in my view. The part of the – what was it, Sara Teasdale, the children in the mill look out (it’s on the golf course) to see the men at play. The working children look out to see the men at play. That’s an example for me as how the artist moves things along. Just as I think Picasso, with that great, great thing that’s in the Museum of Modern Art – Guernica – that’s the most anti-war propaganda, if you will, that can be imagined. So there were all those influences. You’re right about the Enlightenment. And the big questions, the one I wrote in the letter to you, and that is, what’s the best way? I own my house, you own your house. I will keep the street clean in front of my house, and the sidewalk. I will prevent crime in front of my house, and you prevent it in front of yours. Very good, except it doesn’t work, does it?

JWW: Those things are hard to make work, I think, yeah.

CJW: So … but at what point is there too much regulation? We’ve never really worked that out.

JWW: I think that your comments to me really stimulate some thoughts about idealism, and one of the things that I think prevails in your sermons, as well as the sermons of lots of other ministers, is a degree of idealism. Which means, to me, a couple of things, and I really want you to comment. First, that perhaps only a fraction of the people that you may get to preach to become infected with the same idealism, or with the same degree of idealism, and so that there is this natural gulf, or gradient, between those you are reaching out to, and those who may come back and respond. And secondly, you have, if you will, an advantage in perspective with your intellect, frankly, that only a fraction of those you would reach out to have the same kind of access to, I’m thinking now of the amount and type of intelligence that people happen to possess, and so it’s always been a question in my mind, in a sense, of how you kept your enthusiasm for the ideal, with the reality that for some, the ideas of the proof are inaccessible; for some, they haven’t been hit in the head yet with whatever life experience would cause them to be susceptible, to responding in a positive way to the idealism that you would set forth. So in the back of my mind I’ve had a question about, not your idealism, but your faith in it.

CJW: I think the best way to illustrate that is one, an observation, and one, a story. Because of my experience in various things that I worked at, it wasn’t any big shocking surprise to me to find that there were SOBs in the church, even our liberal church. That might have been the case if I was a naïve kid who came out at age 25 from seminary, who would have been shocked to pieces that there were bastards in the church.

JWW: You worked your way up from the mail room.

CJW: [Laughing] Yeah. And so, one. And the second thing, it’s sort of a story that has sustained me, it’s a story, I forget what the fellow was protesting. Let’s say he was anti-war. And his sign [was] about peace. And he’s all alone walking up in front of the Pentagon, all alone. And a policeman, watching him for some hours, finally comes over said, “Buddy, why don’t you go home and get warm. You’re not going to change the world.” And the picket says, “I don’t want the world to change me.”

JWW: So there’s an element of that, I think what you’re suggesting, which says, these are things I need to do for internal reasons. So if I don’t reach someone, or you, in my idealism, it doesn’t change my enthusiasm for it.

CJW: That’s right. And to be quite selfish, I’ll sleep better.

JWW: Sleeping’s good.

CJW: So in a sense … I’m not saying I’ve never compromised. Of course I’ve compromised. But basically that’s it. I really don’t want to change. Now, just because of that, doesn’t mean I was against World War II, I was for it. I never could see a good reason why we were in Korea. And Vietnam, I’m afraid I wore people out on that one. I would have been better advised to have said it fewer times, but nevertheless, so, I can’t have any regrets about it. It was a wrong … the strategy was fine, the tactics could have been better.

JWW: I was about thirty-five years old when I lost my youthful enthusiasm for whoever happened to be our President at the time. I think probably Richard Nixon who did me in as a young adult. I get the feeling that you may have had a more objective view of politics earlier than that kind of age as you grew up.

CJW: I think so. Because one, in the early 20s, when Harding was President, and then after he died, a very strong Republican administration in an era of “good times”, there was this scandal in which these wealthy men were stealing from the Navy – millions of dollars from the Naval oil reserves.

JWW: The Teapot … ?

CJW: And then of course I knew about Democratic politics in Massachusetts, so I did not think that, from a very early age, that any party had halos around its head, that there were flaws with [them] all, and always, I think, my vote and my influence, whatever it might have been, even in a letter to my congressman, was not because I believed that either party was going to provide any kind of Utopia, because none ever will, but on particular issues, if my little influence for a postage stamp or a picket, would do something for that particular issue, even thought I knew there’s going to be no Utopia, I would do it. Still would.

JWW: You had mentioned people like Charles Francis Potter as having influenced perhaps your thinking, or people who, in a sense, had been speaking to you, and you had some resonance with. Who might some other writers or thought leaders have been that you especially found attractive or helpful?

CJW: Pete Seeger. We had a great experience with Pete Seeger in Rochester. He was doing a concert somewhere in town, but through the influence of a couple in the church that had known him when he was singing with The Weavers, which was his original group, got him to come back to our Universalist Church in Rochester, and in the assembly hall, he was singing and had us dancing to about 2 o’clock in the morning after his show. Most of the songs that you would remember, about “little boxes” and everything like that. So very definitely I felt … not that I would [?] along with him, he was very reluctant to criticize the Soviet Union, and I didn’t go along with him there, but in terms other things like equality, civil rights, tawdriness of some parts of our culture, I could go along with him decidedly. And then another influence, although I only met him once, was Norman Thomas, who was the Socialist candidate for President in several elections, getting as many as a million votes in one election. He was a very little man, but someone had him come to Rochester, and they needed a place for him to speak, and I guess they thought of me, and so he spoke at our church, and I was impressed by the breadth of his knowledge. If you wanted to argue economics with him, you had better be informed about all the leading persons who had advocated varieties of economics from Adam Smith to all the way back to Marx, and also because, although he was a Socialist, his principal ideal, his goal, his stance, was for free people. Free people. He had no doubt that if people were free, they would choose the right thing. I think it is naïve, but nevertheless, he was an important person. I never voted for him, because my first vote was in ‘32, and from then on it was Roosevelt, of course, because I felt anybody else, I’d be throwing my vote away. So Norman Thomas. The writings of John Dewey, I mentioned that.

JWW: What would Dewey have written, for example, what were the kind of things he would write about?

CJW: Well, he wrote about education, of course. He also wrote about religion; as I said, his definition of religion was “the process of ideals becoming real.”

JWW: Is he the Dewey Decimal System person?

CJW: No, that’s another Dewey.

JWW: OK.

CJW: He was important politically in New York State, although I’d not always lived there, he was a leading light in the so-called Liberal Party in New York State (it was principally New York City), which was an important influence in New York City for a number of years. And I liked their goals, even though they were called “Red” and all that, they were no more red than …. So John Dewey. FDR, but really, he was reiterating what I had heard from others, as I mentioned before. The Progressive Party, 1896 Democratic platform, the anti-trust activities of Republican Theodore Roosevelt, so part of that … my beliefs were a process too.

JWW: You mentioned at lunch, people like Sinclair Lewis having in a sense “spoken to you”, perhaps influenced you, could you talk a little bit about why there was a resonance in Sinclair Lewis’ writings for you, and anyone else that comes to mind as far as … I think we’re thinking of the formative years, more than later, because that ultimately helped helped determine your direction.

CJW: Most of Sinclair Lewis was published in my mature years. But what is important in the novelist, to my mind, there are many illustrations. For example, you can read a history of the French Revolution. I have one that’s very good. But if you want to get the feeling for it, read Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities. If you want to read the story of Napoleon, fine, read a biography, but also, read those chapters in Les Miserables about the Battle of Waterloo. You the feeling for it. If you want to get the horror of war, sure, read the statistics. If you want to get the feeling, read such a thing as War and Peace.

JWW: So in a sense, maybe there’s a parallel between fiction and its function in the larger context of how art works for humanization, and what Picasso said about art being the lie that lets us tell the truth.

CJW: I think that’s true, because these are fictional characters, [ …] can’t really say it’s a lie. But the virtue of the contribution of the artist, whether it’s Beethoven … some things I hear in Beethoven that say, “this makes life worth living!” … Mozart to me, too. But they are able to relate to us as persons we can identify. Such a man as Sidney Carton in A Tale of Two Cities. Do you remember the story?

JWW: I do not.

CJW: Well, anyway. He was an example of …

JWW: Only the opening line.

Together: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times ....”

CJW: He was a big drunk, a lawyer. But somehow he felt it in him to defend this refugee family, and to take the place of the husband of the woman that Carton was in love with, and go to the guillotine. And you get something in that of … there are persons, not enough, but there are persons who have the capacity to sacrifice with no personal gain coming to them. Which is important … I think it is one of the things that sometimes happens with religious figures. Switching to … this fits in with what somebody asked about what about my sermons that I liked the most. For years I did a now and then series called Great Heretics of the Western World. And they’re still in the boxes in storage down here on the corner in the warehouse. But I took such historical figures of great heretics, beginning with Jesus. Paul, Martin Luther, Savonarola, John Hus, and a few others that don’t come to mind at the moment, because of what they were willing to die for. Now, whether or not my audience would have considered that my best, I don’t know. But I do know that in terms of, this is what I have to say, the biographical sermon is the one I enjoy most. In fact, the next time I’m asked to preach here, I’ll probably use a biographical sermon I have on John Peter Altgeld.

JWW: Oh, I remember him. He was the Illinois labor leader.

CJW: Governor.

JWW: Governor.

CJW: He was called a contemptible revolutionary by some, and others called him Lincoln’s only successor.

JWW: There was a great riot in Chicago around

CJW: Pullman Strike.

JWW: 886

CJW: Oh the Haymarket Riots, yeah.

JWW: where a lot of people died, and he was somehow at the center of that.

CJW: He was elected Governor, and by that time, those arrested in the Haymarket Riots were about to hang, were imprisoned, and he was being urged by many to show mercy to these people. And he simply said, if they were guilty, they’ll get no mercy from me; if they’re innocent, they’ll be pardoned. And he studied the trial extensively. He demonstrated that Judge Gary, for whom Gary, Indiana was named, was part of U.S. Steel, was biased, evidence was faked, the jury suborned, so he pardoned them. If he had merely released them, he would have gotten no flak whatsoever from anybody. But the whole conservative part of the country went up in arms when he pardoned them. And nobody liked him at all except working people. And he was quite a fellow. So he was a great heretic.

[break]

JWW: We were talking about sermons and some of the people whose thinking may have influenced you, and the preference you developed for biographical-based sermon. When you watch other people, and I’m only familiar with maybe a few, you would probably come up with some better names, but years ago when I watched Bill Moyers interview Joseph Campbell, on PBS, on television, it struck me that Joseph Campbell might very well have caused any number of people who hadn’t thought about their faith and the mythologies embedded in them, to think about it, maybe challenge some of that, and I’m wondering if you have a reaction to a Joseph Campbell being on public television, as opposed to turning to channel 72 and finding TV evangelists at 11 o’clock on Tuesday night.

CJW: Well, it so happens that when I was in New York, District [inaudible], we would have all day meetings, usually with a key speaker, and there was one occasion when we had Joseph Campbell. He spoke for 2 hours before dinner, and an hour and a half afterwards, and I don’t think anybody missed a word. I don’t know about his television work, but in person … not as an orator, but a most effective speaker. And not a note. Not a note. He didn’t have any piece of paper with him. He just went on and on, and I felt he was one of the best-informed persons, in the field of religion, that I have ever encountered. Some of his things [inaudible] back with me a little bit, like “find your own bliss”, and that sort of thing. But if I had the money, I’d buy that whole series. It’s on tape, you know. Bill Moyers interviews.

JWW: I didn’t know that, yeah.

CJW: I think he’s an outstanding figure in 20^th century religion. His most effective book, which I used to have, it’s among those that went to Chattanooga, The Hero With a Thousand Faces, and that’s the dying-rising savior god. God of vegetation, god of the Christians … and, no, he’s a great one. Plus, he was not only informed, you might say, in the philosophy of religion, and its varieties across the globe, but he was able to tie it in on a number of occasions with art and sculpture. It was an amazing integration to me. Not only Western art and sculpture, but Eastern, particularly the Hindu and Buddhist. He was an amazingly informed man. I think it was only in his latter years that he got any recognition. For years, he was sort of an obscure teacher at a small college in Manhattan.

JWW: The students at Columbia liked him.

CJW: I’m sure. I think he was remarkable. In a sense, I think his influence with me was more subtle than direct. One of the things he taught me, which other have, but [he] underlined, was that if one person finds his sustenance as a fundamentalist Christian, good for him. If another person finds it in the Buddha, good for him. If another person finds it in Muhammad, good for him. Let’s get together and talk, not about how we differ, but what can we as well-intentioned people do in our community.

JWW: This is probably a transgression that we don’t need for this little exercise here, but I have been struck in the past few weeks by how the Buddhists and Hindus of India and the Muslims of Pakistan are very dangerously at odds at this time, and I associate those countries as having been formed, in the modern sense, partly because of the influence of Gandhi, and how his preaching about nonviolence does not seem to hold sway among the leaders of those countries today, although that was all part of one country when the British owned it.

CJW: That gets back to the liberation of India, yes. The Germans have a word, they have one word, called realpolitik. And I do not see, given the hatred that exists between Pakistani Moslems and Hindus, is going to be resolved in any soon time by either side taking a nonviolent stand. I would hope they would be content to rest on their weapons, so to speak, but the whole problem – not the whole problem – but I find it a bit bizarre that nations like the United States, and France, and Great Britain, and Russia, are telling them that they shouldn’t have [nuclear] weapons, but I haven’t seen one of these nations offer to dispose of all of its nuclear weapons. So I’m a little cynical there. And I have to remember, and this is very unpatriotic, but there’s only one country that has used nuclear weapons.

JWW: When those weapons were used, how were they explained to the population at large?

CJW: They were explained to the population at large that, to use them against the two cities in Japan, would save 100,000 American soldiers’ lives, in an invasion of Japan. That was the principal defense.

JWW: Was the way in which they work explained?

CJW: No. I don’t think that any of us who weren’t scientists had any notion of the cumulative effects of radioactivity, et cetera. But part of the – and here I am a bit cynical, and unpatriotic – one of the reasons that it’s alleged that Truman used it, was to prevent the Soviet Union from being part of the peace process with Japan, because they were already sweeping down through Manchuria – the Soviet forces. And Truman didn’t want any Russians on the USS Missouri signing the peace treaty with Japan. There were indications that Hirohito might be willing to sue for peace. If so, it’s been well buried in those files that exist. Maybe some historian a hundred years from now will find it. So I don’t think it was necessary, if we had been willing to wait awhile before winning. We didn’t have to invade Japan. Or if we did, it didn’t have to be done then. But that’s my view. And of course, that started it. Many of the people who leaked secrets to the then-Soviet Union did so from reasons which they were willing to defend. They did not want just one country to have this weapon. If two countries have it, less likely is it to be used.

JWW: Sometime around 1952 or 1953 I was a grammar school student at Babson Elementary School in Gloucester, Massachusetts, and I can remember we had atomic bomb air-raid drills. Of course, we took these all very seriously, being eleven or twelve years old. We had no idea they’d be useless anyway. It’s kind of … looking back on that to realize that we all went and did drills, and it wouldn’t have mattered what we would have done had we been attacked, because the force of these weapons was so great, that we could not escape annihilation anyway.

CJW: If you were alive for a day, you were radioactive and would die soon. I think in retrospect that that was part of the cold war propaganda. Because, you see, if we had stopped to think, we could have asked such questions as, what delivery systems are there to deliver the Soviet Union’s atomic weapons? Submarines? Don’t we have sonar? You know, and so on. But it certainly was a very real fear for many years, no question. And I would expect that there are still people who keep up shelters.

JWW: I suppose sometimes even bad examples can be useful. In my own mind, having gone through the air raid drills and then having read Nevile Shute’s On the Beach really combined in my consciousness to understand not just the horror but the futility of this kind of situation. We’re probably a little bit off the subject, or maybe we’re not, I don’t know.

CJW: I don’t know. I think that there is no question that nuclear weapons were singularly important in the many years of the Cold War with the Soviet Union. We wouldn’t have been scared of anything in Cuba at all if they hadn’t landed some of their missiles there. And even now, to me, it’s irrational to great big business with China, which is certainly more of a threat to the world than Cuba, and we refuse to do business because we don’t like Castro. And one of the unfortunate things is, in my view – I no longer have the data – but we could have had Castro as an ally if we had allowed him to have his socialist or communist government in Cuba. We’d have done business with him for fifty years. And it was ridiculous, it seems to me, to think of an invasion from Cuba. What are you gonna do, take over Sarasota? So what! You know? But that was agitated by votes – the Cuban exile community in Miami. Which influenced both Democrats and Republicans alike. I can’t think of a group as small as they were, relatively, who have had a greater influence on our foreign policy with Cuba. That’s off a lot of subjects, isn’t it?

JWW: Well, it is. We gotta go back to our list here and see how we’re doing. This is the point in the interview maybe where a George Carlin would migrate to what he refers to as “free-floating hostility.”

[laughter]

If you remember that.

CJW: Yeah, I tried to play that but I can’t get the volume set.

JWW: Oh, it can’t come up? Maybe I just need to give that back to you and you can re-record it. My belief is that we’ve probably touched on in several ways some of the things that your grandson Carl has brought up, and certainly granddaughter Shawn had brought up, and many of the things that Marj brought up and things I had on my mind. Marj has some other questions, and as she she says, they’re in no particular order, and I think you’ll agree. She talks a little bit about people like you and I who at one time smoked cigarettes, and that you had smoked off and on for many years. Her question is, does the motivation for quitting smoking have any effect on the ease of quitting? And I guess I’d have my answer, but we’re …

CJW: Here’s my answer to that. The reason we both stopped smoking when we went to Canton was economic, no question about it. To spend that money for cigarettes when we were so cracked for money, was just simply not in the cards. And it was twenty years before I smoked again. And that was the result of … I had been at a party with Ruth Gray at the home of Harvey and Moody Wallace, in Plainfield, and it was a long night of drinking and partying and the usual bits. And so we stayed over that night with Harvey and Moody, and so the next morning, Harvey and I were the only ones up, about nine o’clock in the morning, so he made coffee, and we sat there, and he brought out his cigarettes. And I was hung over, he was hung over, and I said, “Give me one of those.” And he said “Are you sure you want it?” “Yeah, I want it.” And that’s how I started smoking again.

JWW: But you quit again.

CJW: Oh yeah. I quit again. I don’t think there’s one answer, because different people have different levels of addiction. For many years, after quitting smoking, the last time, I said a cigarette would always look good to me. If I knew I was dying, I’d have somebody get me a pack of cigarettes. I don’t want to feel that way. I wouldn’t … when I’m dying, I don’t want a cigarette.

JWW: We have a friend who quit smoking at age forty, and he would be in his mid fifties now. And he had said at the time he quit that he knew that the long-term consequences, or effects, of smoking took ten years to show up. So once he got to be seventy-two, he was going to start again, because he only wanted to live to be eighty-two, and it wouldn’t matter. [laughter] He probably won’t either, so ….

CJW: Part of my attitude towards it springs from hospital visitations, where I have seen people lingering, perhaps not in agony, because they were drugged for pain, but I’ve said to myself, I don’t want to die like that, something caused by cigarettes. I may still do it, because of the long-range effects, but I hope by that time, a simple lethal cocktail would be available.

JWW: I was listening to public radio a few weeks ago, and they were talking the fact that some of the video games that are being played today, and I’m really thinking about about teenagers and young adults, have … that the human brain produces a chemical when you win [in] a video game, that is identical to the chemical that the human brain produces when you take cocaine. Now, it is not cocaine, but what they’re thinking is that at least the attraction, and perhaps, if you will, the addiction for video games has a chemical foundation that is identical to cocaine. And it may well be that the use of tobacco – perhaps nicotine is one of those chemicals – the most obvious suspect, I think – the brain reacts and produces a chemical, which is what you really want. And when you and I have had discussions about our dissatisfaction with the media, and we start from different points and I think get to the same place as far as the media is concerned, I am still convinced that it is the stimulation of the production of adrenaline by outrageous and sensational stories, that people become, if you will, dependent upon. And so I’m going to turn this station back on because I know they’re going to lead – this is all subconcious - I know they’re going to lead with a story that will get me pumped.

CJW: I guess that’s why – I surf the channels in the evening, hoping to find something – and there are a couple channels, where, I could bet a hundred dollars to ten that they’ll be talking about Clinton and Monica Lewinsky.

JWW: Somebody like Christopher Matthews on Hardball, for example.

CJW: Yeah, that’s a good example. And also, Pat Buchanan’s sister. I forget her name. And so, I think there’s something to it. Of course, we’re discovering more and more about the brain – scientists are – and I think what you have in what we call our brains, and I’m not a scientist obviously, as you know, I think it’s a combination of chemistry and electronics. Synapses. Someone said that there’s a type of electrical impulse that can go from here to here [holds out left then right hands] without passing through here [indicates middle]. I have no understanding of what that means, but if it’s true, I think it explains something of our brain activities. And, there are also, these, what do they call them, endomorph [endorphins]? Pleasure/pain impulses? Anyway, I think that may be the next great scientific area. I mean, it has been for some time, but there are more and more discoveries being made. And discoveries may scare the hell out of us. But I think that’s the field in this matter that I mentioned to you, somewhere, evolutionary psychology. That is based on that.

JWW: One of the books that Kevin gave me is called Emotional Intelligence. And it talks about the fact that our brains are wired to prepare us to react to situations that would, if we don’t give them any thought, can seem threatening. And so we may become physically or emotionally defensive, we may strike out, we may do things, as a matter of just a reaction to a situation. And that through the development of emotional intelligence, we allow ourselves to examine incoming messages or stimuli, before we react and do something with them. And that that is really the next area for focus for human beings, is to see that all people can, if you will, make choices as to when to allow their reptilian brain rule them, and when they going to let their homo sapien brain to rule them.

CJW: Turn that off, I have a story I want to tell you, that I don’t want on tape.

[break]

JWW: Well this might be a good time in the tape to jump around a bit and cover some oddball subjects and then come back to any tangent we find ourselves on. My siblings certainly, if not others, are going maybe be a little envious of me being the one who got to have this discussion with you, and so they may show up with a camera some day with their own questions, I don’t know! [laughs]

CJW: I’ll really throw a curve and say different things! [laughs]

JWW: And the other reason why they’ll be envious is that I got to hear the story about the fruit warehouse and they didn’t!

CJW: The manager of the fruit …

JWW: Going back to perhaps the children for a moment. What can you recall about … I certainly know that my mother’s sister’s first name is Marjorie. You’ve told me your grandmother’s first name was Annette, or Anna, so although I didn’t know this, I’m jumping to the conclusion that and you and my mother had put together those two names, and that’s how she became named. I know mine’s even simpler. What about the other children, and what about Peter and Martha, and the names, what’s some of the background of the names?

CJW: Your mother had an aunt Martha. I don’t know why Peter was Peter. Good name, that’s all. Good strong, masculine name.

JWW: Well, she had a nephew Peter – Paulding.

CJW: I’m not sure he was alive then.

JWW: He may not have been born yet. Yeah.

CJW: Well, maybe he was …. Was he the oldest Paulding?

JWW: No no no, he wouldn’t have been, because I think Buddy was born in 1929, and by the time Peter was born, Buddy wouldn’t have been married yet. So that can’t be it.

CJW: That’s right. Peter is not Bud’s son, he’s his grandson.

JWW: Right. So … but Peter shows up in both families, so maybe there was something earlier in the Pauldings.

CJW: There may have been. The only thing in the Westmans, and this may have … and I don’t know if I ever told your mother or if it had influenced me.... Years ago, when I was still at 32 Oliver Street, there came a knock at the door. A man was there, a young man as I recall, looking through the front window. He said, “My name is Peter Westman, I think I am a cousin of your husband.” And my mother, one of the things I never could understand, she didn’t even invite him in, just stood there, talked a couple minutes, and he went away. She did the same thing with one of the Nelson cousins from New York – Anna Larson – she was Anna Nelson originally, she married Larson, who was a carpenter. She did the same with Anna and Larson. Didn’t even invite them in. I never had the moxie to ask why, it’s something my mother just wouldn’t answer. So she ignored it. 

[End of Part 3]